Archives: All articles

He has been lauded as India's most dynamic scientist. The list of prestigious awards and citations he has received runs into many pages. He took science out of the lab and brought it to factory floors. He has done more than most others to protect India's traditional knowledge that the MNCs eye avariciously. As the longest-serving (13 years) director-general of the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR), which controls 40-odd research outfits with roughly 18,000 employees and an...

[With Alam Srinivas] It was the kind of ugly spat that doesn't exactly cover the Indian petroleum industry with glory. On one side was the director general, Hydrocarbons (DGH), head of a regulatory body that is under the administrative control of the Union ministry of petroleum & natural gas, an individual who doesn't enjoy the kind of independence that his counterparts in the telecom and power sectors do. On the other side was the country's largest (in terms of assets) and the most profitable...

The name sounded deceptively familiar, except it seemed to be in the wrong country. No, it wasn't Chandigarh, but Chundrigar. The reference was to Ibrahim Ismail Chundrigar, the minister for trade and commerce in the first Cabinet of the newly-constituted government of Pakistan headed by Mohammed Ali Jinnah, and prime minister for a brief two months in 1957. And the road that bears his name is busier than most major thoroughfares in Karachi on working days, hardly surprising since it happens to...

Deng Puffs 555 Kolkata and Calcutta—jealous mistress and dutiful wife; city of joy and megapolis of despair; arrogant about her intellectual prowess yet unsure of urban regeneration; glitzy malls and imperial colonnades cracking at the seams; brilliant beams of light in uneasy coexistence with quasars. Remember the infamous black hole? To use former West Bengal finance minister and author Ashok Mitra's memorable analogy: more poets per square km than even football fans. Rajiv Gandhi was wrong...

One of the tallest buildings in downtown Mumbai's financial district is the imposing 25-storeyed headquarters of the country's central bank and apex monetary authority. The higher one moves up the hierarchy in the RBI the more rarefied the atmosphere gets. Especially if one belongs to a northeastern state like Assam or, worse, a scheduled caste. This realisation came the hard way for the seniormost executive director of the RBI, R.B. Barman, who was first promoted as deputy governor last...

The government hasn't covered itself in glory by following a convoluted, arbitrary and opaque bidding process that led to a flurry of allegations of nepotism. Few were, therefore, surprised at the legal recourse taken by a bidder criticising the implementation of the programme to revamp the nation's two largest airports. This, because the tendering system was marked by subjective evaluation criteria and frequent changes in rules while the game was on. The criteria to judge the technical bids...

It's rare that the Reliance group doesn't succeed in bulldozing its way through the capital's labyrinthine corridors of power. But the manner in which the bidding process for the contracts to modernise and partially privatise the country's two largest airports in Delhi and Mumbai was sought to be manipulated, unsuccessfully, indicates there could be some hope yet for a country where crony capitalism hardly raises too many eyebrows. Influential corporates can fail to convince a pliant political...

At least three books have been published over the last 20 years about India's first family of businessmen, the Ambanis. The first by S.R. Mohnot was somewhat prosaic and academic in its style and content. Polyester Prince written by Hamish McDonald was a racy compilation of facts, most of which had appeared in newspapers like the Indian Express. For reasons best known to the Ambanis, this book is not available in India though quite a few photocopied versions are in circulation. Alam Srinivas has...

The verses and songs of Robert Zimmerman, better known as Bob Dylan, articulated the angst and aspirations of an entire generation. His lyrics and tunes, sung and recorded zillions of times, continue to enthrall thousands, even those who know nothing of the anti-establishment mood of the '60s. Over the decades, Dylan changed drastically, as did his music. His seminal The Times They Are A-Changin became an advertising jingle for an accountants' firm, while a track from his 2001 album "Love and...

Just days after the finance minister announced his budget proposal to hike the cap on FDI in telecom firms from 49 to 74 per cent, the bureaucracy had started working overtime. A fortnight later, on June 23, a draft cabinet note was readied and inter-ministerial consultations on it are now almost complete. The note, a copy of which is with Outlook, is a clear attempt to address the concerns raised by security agencies and allay the fears among the Left parties, which support the government from...